


not to listen but to hear

by misandrywitch



Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: (and also pre-the final problem), 5+1 Things, M/M, Mutual Pining, POV Sherlock Holmes, Post-Story: The Adventure of the Empty House, Post-The Final Problem, Vignette, absolutely NOT case fic, we're doing it all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-05-22
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:54:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24314602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misandrywitch/pseuds/misandrywitch
Summary: When I least expected it, I seemed to discover a new expression on his guileless face, unfolding like a line of facts to be read and understood.(Or - six scenes in which Holmes finds something on Watson's face that doesn't need to be said aloud).
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 34
Kudos: 117





	not to listen but to hear

**Author's Note:**

> for some reason the hell universe of 2020 has just succeeded in toppling me back into rereading every single one of these stories, and now seemed the time to write about them again. it's been a very long time since i've written canon holmeswatson so be gentle. i missed them. 
> 
> got thinking a great deal about homes's trick of pulling watson's train of thought right off his face and into the air, and how that might surprise him when he isn't using it to impress - and thus this was born. thank you to nat for taking a spin through this in its final stages.
> 
> i know everybody and their mother has to write their own version of the post-reichenbach dynamic & reunion, so i hope you'll be willing to read mine. title's loosely from the poem "I Have Not Come Here to Compare Notes But to Sit Together in the Stillness at the Edge of This Wound" by david kirby ("i have nothing to say to you, really. i just want to see what I’m looking at."

"Do you mean to say that you read my train of thoughts from my features?" 

"Your features, and especially your eyes.”

_\- The Adventure of the Cardboard Box_

1\. (1881)

We had hoped to reach the street quickly enough to stop the impending disaster, but we arrived too late. It had taken me far longer to sort through newspaper archives than I expected, and so by the time I returned to Baker Street and all but pulled Watson out the door behind me, the sun was already darkening the sky. He had been surprised but game, already a pattern in the three cases I'd invited him to sit in on. Since the night of the Hope affair I'd had no reason to ask him to dash after me to follow a developing trail, and there was a part of me that was eager to see what he'd say.

The constabulary had already gathered in the street, blocking a dirty alleyway, and I was somewhat relieved to see Inspector Lestrade’s familiar face among them. I couldn’t say I respected the man, but I could count on him not to turn me away from the scene of a crime without hearing me out first. 

“How did they manage to get here before we did?” Watson, hurrying at my elbow with his uneven step, sounded out of breath. I didn’t answer him, just pushed my way past a burly police officer until Lestrade saw us approach and waved us over. 

“Mr. Holmes,” Lestrade sighed. “Dr. Watson. I should pretend to be surprised to see you here when we barely found out about this a half hour ago, but I haven’t the energy.” 

“Your officers are inexpertly examining the body of a young brunette woman in a dark house coat, a distinctive mole under her left eye. A typist, lives with her mother who is heavily in debt and refuses to leave the house, routinely walks this street late at night because she has nobody to accompany her on her errands.” I said it flatly, “Unless I am much mistaken.” 

“Usually,” Lestrade said, sour-faced, “I appreciate it when you’re right, Mr. Holmes. Can I ask how on earth you knew all that?”

“She came to us for help,” I said. “Two days ago.” His sour expression darkened into a true scowl. 

“Dead?” Watson’s voice was unnerved and his eyes, following my face, clouded over. “We were too late?” 

“To prevent her death.” I could not coat my words in reassurance, even in the face of his blue eyes and the strife there. I could only say what I knew. “But not too late to find who murdered her.” 

“Murder!” Lestrade blanched, tried to cut in front of me as I in turn attempted to skirt my way into the alley that contained the body. “All I know is that, half an hour ago, a boy making deliveries to this public house reported a woman lying prone in the alley. He tried to rouse her with no success. We cannot call this a murder until our pathologist can look at the body, and he hasn’t arrived. Some of us must operate inside the rules of the law.” He sighed, wrung his hands. “It isn’t pretty, Mr. Holmes.” 

The victim was a young woman who, two days before, had sat herself in front of us in our rooms at Baker Street and told us a strange tale involving doors that should be locked, and a gentleman following her in shadow late at night. From a distance, I could see her neck was bent and twisted. Nothing natural about the shape of her fallen form, nothing living. Two days ago, Watson had brought her brandy to calm her nerves, brought laughter to her face in spite of her fear. He attempted to peer past both Lestrade and myself into the alley, and I turned to block his way. 

“No,” I admitted. “No it is not. Perhaps we ought - “ 

Watson’s eyebrows were set, a particular shape and cast I hadn’t yet seen on his face. In the first weeks of our cohabitation, I had made the kind of erroneous assumption that can sink a line of deduction like a clean shot; I’d assumed I had all the pertinent facts. 

I had taken stock of his tanned wrists and military bearing, his distinct limp and the way he pulled one shoulder tighter than the other - and made deductions. His tendency to startle at a sound from the street, and his late-night pacing, and his brother’s pocket-watch and nearly vanished accent - and made more. His carefully controlled anger, his deflection toward his own past and attempts to look like he was interested in my own, his obvious gambling habit and aversion to drink unless prompted. They painted a picture of a certain kind of man - unobtrusive, moderately intelligent, middling good company with shattered health and a few bad habits. 

And even with this surplus of data about my new flatmate at my disposal, Watson had managed to surprise me. 

When I least expected it, I seemed to discover a new expression on his guileless face, unfolding like a line of facts to be read and understood. His humor, his well-mannered bearing that nearly prevented any polite inquiry into my work, no matter how I paraded it in front of him. His level-headed awe that buoyed him through the Jefferson Hope debacle, and how he wrote down the details afterwards. His delighted surprise when I presented the twist in a case and my own reasoning that brought me there - which was nothing more than that. Delighted surprise, free of suspicion or unnerved disbelief, like I had never experienced.

So when I turned to usher Watson away from the alley and the body, I found myself stopping short to see a flash of clear anger on his face.

It read thus, flat out in the crease between his brows: 

_Like everyone, sometimes even myself, you assume that my shattered nerves and the scar tissue along my collarbone and the limp I try to cover in my stride indicate that I cannot do this._

Considering a little extrapolation of my own, I understood so swiftly it nearly rocked me back on my heels. 

He had seen more bodies with the life removed from them in two years before we met than I ever had, even considering my occasional excursions into the St. Bart’s morgue after hours. And he has seen men die. Men he knew, or even cared for. Men he had tried to save. 

My own knowledge, its scope and utility, hard-studied and well-earned I had always thought, felt momentarily insignificant. 

“Watson,” I said it low enough so Lestrade, still hovering behind me, couldn’t overhear, “could I trouble you for your professional opinion?” 

Watson’s face cleared. A raise of the eyebrows, released tension in the jaw. He nodded, an acquiescence of my suggestion, and beneath his careful reluctance I saw the flash of something bright and alive. 

“Lestrade,” I said briskly, “no need to wait. Dr. Watson can examine the body. Enough for me to be getting on with, at any rate.” 

“Doctor,” Lestrade shrugged, and stepped aside to clear our way into the alley. 

Watson’s expression as he moved past me read trepidation - _No longer truly a doctor, am I?_ \- but he knelt in the mud next to the fallen body. Steadied his left knee and braced one arm on his bad leg to bend forward. He studied the corpse, turned the girl’s neck to press careful fingers along the livid bruising there. And I studied him. 

“What do you see?” I asked. 

“She was strangled, wasn’t she?” Lestrade sighed again and shuffled his feet in the mud. The night was growing damp and colder, fog settling in. He wanted to be out of the street. I wanted him to make himself scarce, as well. “Even I can see that.” 

“She was,” Watson said slowly. He was careful in a way I appreciated, meticulous with his study if not with the details he pulled from them. “But that isn’t what killed her. Look, Holmes.” 

I knelt in the mud next to him, followed the pointing line of his finger. He had an intermittent tremor in his hands, but it was absent now. There was a wound, bloody, hidden beneath her hair. He had lifted her braid to find it. 

“Excellent, Watson,” I said. The nature of the injury was already aligning with the details inside my head and I could see the way this act of violence unfolded and why. 

“She was struck from behind with something sharp,” Watson said definitively; if it were somebody else I might have snapped to spare the obvious but I let him finish. “While somebody had their hands around her neck. More than one man was here?” 

“Exactly so,” I said, and stood. He followed stiffly, rubbing his hands together in the chill. 

“What do we do now?” His face was a question; he looked at me to see an answer. 

“Isn’t it obvious?” 

Watson almost smiled. “Not yet,” he said. “But I await your explanation.”

2\. 1891

Even high above them, the falls roared in my ears and the only thing louder was my own frightening pulse. 

From a distance, I saw Watson approach the scene of my fabricated crime. It would have been the scene of my demise, without luck or chance. I had written him a letter knowing it might be the last thing I ever put to paper - knowing that he would want those final words for himself. When we'd met he had been a shell of a man who'd previously been a doctor and he'd transformed, with slow time, into somebody very nearly a writer. It shouldn't have mattered to me, whether or not anybody heard the record of my last thoughts. My triumph should have been able to stand on its own. But it would matter to Watson. And I found, as I wrote them down, that I very much wanted him to know them. 

But they were not final. My luck - and my folly. 

From a distance, I could see the moment he came to the realization. His face stricken and his hands shaking. Holding aloft my cigarette case and the letter. His legs gave way. 

I was too far from him to see the expression on his features, as I would ever be again. That was as clear as the salt spray on my stinging face. As soon as I glimpsed the outline of a second man, a sharpshooter’s eye and the second attempt on my own life, I knew. The web was more tangled, and more dangerous, than I ever anticipated - and Watson could only be free of it if he knew nothing of it. 

Those were the facts. I clung to them. To the cold and logical truth that Watson had, sometimes in jest and sometimes in his rare true anger, implied ruled my conscience. 

His shoulders bowed, his back bent. He was holding his face in his hands and if he spoke, I could not hear him.

I did not move, until he righted himself and turned away. He would be back soon, if I knew him at all, with more men to help search. They would find Moriarty's body at the bottom of that steep ravine and that would be all. And end of it's own kind. Watson would carry that story back with him, and all I hope is that he could find a way to someday understand. 

He ran, alone, away from the falls and towards the town and help. I turned, alone, towards the cliffside, and the future. 

3\. 1894

The silhouette cast in the front windows was so familiar that it stopped me still for a moment. 

For three years, I had closed my eyes and envisioned that shape as I had seen it hundreds of times. Set against his armchair or peering from the front window into the street. Leaning over the paper and breakfast or asleep across from me in a train car or at my elbow. Ready with a reassurance, with the right words I could never find to soothe a scared mind, with a well-aimed shot, with orderly stitches and a steady hand. 

The shock of seeing his figure in this room, this city, had not yet faded even in the several weeks since I had returned to London, and since he had returned to our rooms in Baker Street. Against the window, I allowed my eye to sweep across his tidy hair, the curve of brow and nose and his mustache and strong jawline, the slightly irregular set of his shoulders where the left was pulled tighter into scar tissue and tendons. 

“Holmes,” Watson said. His voice creaked, late night disuse dropping it low. “I woke you.” 

I’d attempted to get some rest, but had gotten no farther than undressing before my thoughts stuck on a particular question I’d been asked that morning. A strange puzzle, involving a set of vanished eyeglasses, likely stolen, and two footprints where there should have been none. The sounds of Watson moving around upstairs had stopped, then begun again hours into the night. He had awoken some time after he’d retired for the evening to come downstairs and sit at the window in the dark. 

“No,” I said. “I was awake. The problem of the secretary’s absent eyeglasses won’t let me rest, it seems.” 

“There’s more to it than you first thought, then?” There was something off-balance about the night, his furtive glance in my direction. He presented the question clumsily but surely, and I leapt at an excuse to follow a normal conversation. He, asking and I, explaining. 

“An oddity,” I agreed. “London seems to be awash with them these days. And they do have a way of finding their way here.” 

“Rather my fault.” Watson gazed out the window still, and so I made myself cross the room to remove the strange space between us. I chose a pipe from the mantle, joined him against the sill with the stem between my teeth. The light was a swift glow of warmth between us. “You’ve been built up to something rather sensational, I’m afraid. All of England seems eager to dig through their own family histories for a something strange enough to attract your attention.” 

I had read his account of those final, terrible days in Switzerland months after it had been published, sent to me across the world by my brother with no other comment or note. And I had first read the following narrative, of Colonel Moran’s demise and my own miraculous return, as a draft handed to me without comment but an implied question of approval. Watson had never volunteered the drafts of his early stories for my perusal, before I had left. Sensational, yes. I couldn’t resist my own dramatic entrance, and the story was his own small revenge.

“They could try harder,” I said. “So many of them are so obviously fake. I much prefer a good murder.” 

“Much to the relief of Scotland Yard,” Watson said, relaxing slightly into amusement. “You do know their number of unsolved cases nearly tripled in the three years that you - “ 

He stopped short, like he had forgotten himself. 

“That I was gone,” I said. Completing his statement, stating the obvious. He didn’t move. I found myself talking still, nearly inappropriate in the night quiet. “I can’t say I’m surprised, given the general state of things there. It’s more of a surprise to discover one of their officers has the makings of a logical brain in his head. But I had hoped one of them might learn something.” 

Watson ignored this dig in the direction of the Yard, and he didn’t turn to look at me.

“That you were dead,” he said, ending his own sentence like I hadn’t spoken at all. I had missed something. He turned to the window again. 

In the dim light from the street I archived his face, cataloged the consistencies and the changes there. He wore his mustache longer than he had before, three years allowing for a change in fashion. He was thinner. There were lines around his mouth and shadows under his eyes he never had before, not even freshly returned from Afghanistan thin and brown and desperate. And there was a reticence in his gaze that had never existed before, a dividing wall between his thoughts and his face. Or perhaps I had simply lost the touch to read them so clearly. I had used the trick in the past to bemuse him. Now, it felt like an intrusion. 

It felt self-aggrandizing to assign myself all the blame. I could not determine, without data, which of the changes I could see stemmed from my own actions, from the loss of his wife, from the simple passing of time. Perhaps they were all tangled together. 

“That I was dead,” I said, a compromise. I might as well have been. A specter, stalking through my own footsteps. “You’re not sleeping well.” 

“And you loathe pointing out the obvious,” Watson said, which was well deserved. “You’re right as usual, old man. I can’t say that I am. I thought it might improve, moving back here. It did, after the war. Eventually.” 

“Eventually.” I remembered those early days. His chronic insomnia, his nightmares. They followed him like a shadow. The ones I saw around him now were different, slow to lift. That was true for both of us. 

“I have this feeling,” Watson said, and his words were slow, coming out of him in starts like he wasn’t sure of their destination, “that I can’t seem to shake.”

“What is it?” 

He gave me a look sideways. Pipe smoke drifted between us in a slow haze, trapped against the window glass. 

“There were times,” he said, “where I’d wake and before I opened my eyes I’d be certain to find myself back here, at Baker Street, with you waiting on me to dress and catch a cab. I would be so certain, down to the suit I’d don and the clues we’d be following. And when I’d open my eyes I’d find myself right where I was supposed to be, with Mary asleep next to me. Or, later, sitting in my office or by her bedside - “ 

He stopped, wet his lips. He hadn’t spoken in detail of Mary’s death, and I hadn’t asked. 

“And now,” he continued, “that we are back here I seem to dream that I’m there again, and that when I open my eyes that none of this will be real - “ 

He stopped a second time, shutting his jaw on his own words so quickly I could hear his teeth snap against each other. The sharp sound dispelled the strange and tenuous stillness cleanly, and I found my own voice steady on my reply. 

It was a marvel, how he said such things aloud when I had barely begun to try and make sense of them in myself. Baker Street - its busy street and seventeen steps, the things I had left behind scarcely moved, and its three inhabitants - nothing more than a dream. A reprieve, more mutable than memory. I was no stranger to that. 

I sought detail to counteract the slow drift of that thought - my pipe stem between my teeth, and the lingering scent of Watson’s brand of tobacco and the sleepy realness of his body. Not how I remembered it at all. 

“Man is but an ass,” I said, “if he go about to expound this dream.” 

That made him chuckle, as I knew it would. He liked Shakespeare’s romantic stories best, much more than the histories. I always preferred the tragedies. 

“Then I can be thankful for my own face,” he said, smiling. “I’ve been called an ass before, but not for that reason.” 

“Watson,” I said, and then stopped. His own seat at the window, and mine leaning against the frame, meant he had to look up to me. I did not know what I wanted to say, exactly, but acknowledging his fears and my own, mirrored but not the same, was what he would insist on were he in my place. So I thought, until I saw his expression. 

I encroached the edge of something yet unspoken between us, and we both knew it. I had spun for him a remarkable story and he, shirt collar still loosened and brandy on his lips, had listened as he always had. Had followed me as he always had, into danger and triumph. That night, he and I and Mrs. Hudson had sat up and marvelled at our success, laughed like the old days, and when asked, he had moved his belongings back into Baker Street with no hesitation. But we had not spoken of it. 

_Don’t -_ he said, without words. _Not now. You are not ready for what I have to say, and I am not ready to say it._

We stared at each other, me caught in that plea. 

“Since we’re both awake and I find the cursed eyeglasses weighing on my mind,” I said briskly, like I had never intended to say anything else, “I may play something. I had the Stradivarius retuned last week. Mycroft kept it in relatively good condition, considering how little he knows about instruments.” 

“You may wake Mrs. Hudson,” Watson said, “and she will have your head.” 

“I’ll give her that one.” I pointed at the decimated bust of my face, the round bullet hole in its forehead open like a third eye. 

“I do wish you’d get rid of that thing,” Watson glared at it and it seemed to glare back. “It’s gruesome.” 

“I’m sure I’ll find another use for it,” I said, and crossed the room to gather my violin. He watched me with something like relief, a fragile warmth in his blue eyes. “To shield me from Mrs. Hudson’s ire, anyway. Be warned, Watson. I may be rather rusty.” 

“I’m sure I can’t tell the difference,” he said amicably, and leaned back against the window to watch me rosin my bow. 

It was late, the night quiet. And it had been some time since I’d played for him or anyone to hear. I ghosted fingers over strings in scales, perfunctory. He was quite right; he could never tell a well-performed piece from a poorly presented one, and always mixed up his Baroque composers. 

I chose Brahms; a bit ambitious, but it suited the night. Opening chords, the strings bit into my fingers in that old and familiar pressure. 

Across the room, Watson tilted his head back to listen. One sour note, but he didn’t comment or notice. Quite the wrong tempo too. It didn’t matter. I followed the line of the music, the swell and pull. He didn’t comment as I finished the Brahms, but smiled, and so I rewarded him with ten minutes of Gilbert and Sullivan. In his face now I could see some measure of peace. 

And I wished, or hoped - not for the first time but never quite so clearly as this moment - that he could read in my face the shape of my own thoughts, the kind I could not find a way to put into words.

4\. 1895

The sound of a shot - the acrid odor of gunpowder. 

Two days ago, Gregson had nearly knocked down our front door with an urgent plea. I had been secretly pleased at the number of improbable cases the Yard walked my way in the six months since my return to London, and this one was no different. Three mysterious fires, a suspect seen fleeing the scene, and a member of the same family present in each home that shortly afterwards went up in smoke. It had all unfolded quickly after my discovery of a set of ash-coated footprints, and night found us in quick pursuit, our suspect dodging cabs and leading us on a merry chase through alleys and back streets. I was grateful for Watson, and his loaded revolver, three steps behind me as we rounded a corner to find a dead end and brick walls. 

Which led to this moment, and the cornered suspect firing a wild shot down an alley in our direction. In spite of myself, I flinched but it was Watson who stumbled backwards with a bitten-off cry. He stumbled, breath coming fast. I could not afford to take my eye off our target and yet I did, for a moment, turn my head. 

Over the last three years, in my far journeys, I had thought to have grown the kind of spine that could not be shaken. The things I had seen, had done. I had been well-prepared, I assumed, to return to London and face whatever peril the final removal of Colonel Moran might involve - and the possibilities were always clear as glass in my mind. Danger, to my housekeeper, my brother, my friend. 

But an idea in concept was not the same as being faced with a moment of physical terror, no matter how often considered. Watson belt double, clutching his left shoulder with his right hand. I absorbed detail; the tear in his jacket, the smell like burning fabric covering a low coppery tang, the pulse in his throat right under his jaw. His eyes looked to mine, their color lost in the late night gloom, and whatever he saw on my face must have startled him because he straightened faster than I could stop him. All in a matter of seconds, precious time to lose track of our target. 

“I’m fine,” Watson snapped this like a command to my unasked question, a rare tone of near-military precision that didn’t suit him or the words. 

For a frantic moment I considered the impulse to fade into hysteria. Grasping his shoulder, murmuring the obvious - _You’ve been hit._

“He is getting away,” I said instead, shortly. 

“Hold still,” Watson said, teeth gritted in a rictus. With one hand, his left, he pushed me flat against the brick wall and with his right he raised his revolver and sighted along his own arm. I held my breath. If he had not asked for stillness, I would have given it anyway. If I breathed, my ribs would be pressed against his own. His right hand was slick and red across his fingers and I felt the moment he held his breath and pulled the trigger. 

Watson fired. Once, twice with neat precision. Our target collapsed, howling and clutching his leg. 

For a moment, still pressed together, we stared at each other. I didn’t dare to exhale. As soon as he’d fired the shot, Watson had gasped in great breaths of relief. The action blew hot across my neck and my ear. 

Then he released me, shoved his gun into my hand, and nearly sprinted away from the wall to attend to the man he’d landed a bullet in. His second shot had landed true, right in the suspected arsonist’s ankle. I watched as, still bleeding, Watson bent over the man who had shot him and tore at the fellow’s shirtsleeves to bind the wound he’d placed in his leg. 

The police arrived in enough time for a red stain to spread across the shoulder of Watson’s coat. I watched it grow, steady but slow enough that, rationally, I could calculate the size and depth of the injury. It had hit him in the left shoulder below his collarbone at an angle, tearing his jacket and shirt and scorching his collar. Not deep but bleeding freely - my mind could accept those facts. Still, watching that stain spread as Watson bent over our suspect until the police pulled him upright and into cuffs was intolerable. 

Gregson insisted we all return to the station with him so we were bundled into a cab. Watson winced as it jostled, one hand pressed hard over his shoulder. 

“Let me,” I said, guiding his fingers out of the way. He let me, wide-eyed, and I pushed the heel of my gloved hand into the juncture of his shoulder until he hissed. My pulse beat heavy in the tension-hot heel of my hand, and I could feel his own there too, unsteady. 

“He grazed me,” Watson said, “it isn’t serious. It stings, is all.” But he didn’t push my hand away. 

I rattled off details and a statement to Gregson without hardly hearing myself speak. I took no pleasure in the conclusion, however clever. A police surgeon put stitches in Watson’s shoulder in the other room, and Gregson gave me a queer look when I asked after the man’s competence. 

“Don’t worry, Mr. Holmes,” he said, shaking his head. “You know we admire the doctor around here. He’ll be alright.” 

And so we returned to Baker Street. Watson held onto his own elbow in the cab, careful to not put weight against his own shoulder. I stared past him at the dark street, and said nothing. 

Mrs. Hudson fretted and gasped at the state of Watson’s jacket when we returned, foisting hot tea on us while I scowled from the fireplace. He accepted her ministrations with his typical patience for much longer than I would have, even at her insistence we turn around again and visit the hospital. 

“It isn’t necessary,” Watson said, gently shooing Mrs. Hudson out of the room with the kind of grace that completely disguised it as an attempt to be rid of her. “Really, it’s quite superficial. If I am in any pain tomorrow, I will call on the hospital. I promise.” 

She had the audacity to cast me a glance as she left, and Watson shut the door on her with a sigh. He turned back to his tea, sipped it one-handed with the balance of very old practice, and started to work his jacket off slowly. I could have offered to assist but didn’t, just lingered at the fireplace and simply watched as he pulled his own arm through his coat sleeve, wincing and muttering. 

“Well, that may have gone worse. The greatest casualty of the whole encounter is the state of this jacket.” Watson held the tattered garment up with one arm, frowning. “Torn clean through. And this stain! I should know better than to wear new jackets out when you get ideas in your head.” 

That particular vein of deadpan humor was new in the last three years, and somewhat alarming. “Now is hardly the time to employ me as a whetstone to sharpen your wit,” I snapped. 

“Turnabout is fair play,” Watson said, instead of bristling at my tone. He tossed the jacket aside despondently. “As I am so often the whetstone that knocks away the obviously incorrect conclusions you may otherwise be forced to spare time considering.” 

Watson was a predictable man - patient, effective, in near-unfailing good humor. Still, it infuriated me. 

“It shouldn’t have happened at all,” I said sourly. “He caught me entirely off-guard. I should have expected he’d know we were on his tail and been prepared for that, should have known he’d retaliate - “ 

“Holmes,” Watson said, voice soft in that tone he adopted when talking to the families of murder victims and sobbing widows in armchairs. Something delicate, as if he expected me to flee. In spite of all my attempts, I was doing a poor job of disguising my own malcontent. “I promise, I am quite alright.”

“It shouldn’t have happened,” I repeated. 

“Sometimes,” Watson said diplomatically, “things happen that even you cannot predict. A mad arsonist with a gun would qualify.” 

How fascinating, I thought, to watch the pull of panic take its toll on me from the outside in. Such emotions were easy to dissect in other people, a cause and effect explanation for their actions, their irrationality. I had accepted long ago that I could not remove them entirely, but had resolved to not let them act on me. Now, I could scarcely do anything more than watch them work. 

He stared at me for a long moment and there was nothing I could discern on that face, features now more familiar than my own and as legible as the front page of a book. 

Then, suddenly, he moved into action. Watson exhaled sharply, and then began to pull at his own tie, and then his collar. He tossed both aside before I could open my mouth to ask if, perhaps, his wits had been shot clean off when the bullet grazed him. He had already turned his attention to his shirt buttons, his precise doctor’s hands flicking them open at his throat. 

“Come here,” he said and, not understanding, I crossed the room to him. I wanted to leap into the certainty of determination, reveal his intentions to myself before he revealed them to me and also - I did not dare to guess what he was thinking. I did not want to dare. 

Buttons undone, Watson pulled his own shirt down over his left shoulder with his opposite hand, and turned around to face me. His gaze was steady. 

“You do prefer to see things for yourself,” he said. “Go on.” 

The bullet had hit him at the edge of the considerable scar his shoulder already bore, and the neat stitches he’d received from the police surgeon pulled the tissue white and flat. Three lines of black thread, carefully tied off. I counted them with my eyes, studied the red edge of the wound, the crater of scarring a souvenir from the bullet that had, years ago, entered through his back, shattered his shoulder blade, and broken his collarbone. The new injury was clean. It would heal without trouble. 

“I will have one more scar where I already have many.” He was watching me study him, and the act of being observed made the process more intimate. “In time, nobody will be able to tell it even happened.”

“I will know,” I said. The longer I studied the black threads in his skin the longer I could avoid considering the rest of him, exposed throat and the remains of freckles on his upper arm, the hair on his chest.

“I know.” 

“Just as I knew the man was dangerous. I should not have - “ 

“Holmes.” He still hadn’t moved to pull his shirt over his shoulder, standing still under my scrutiny for far longer than I needed to bear witness to the facts. “I knew the danger, too. I chose to go with you just as I chose to shoot him. Being fussed over by a police doctor is not an experience I enjoy, but please let’s not pretend I am not capable of accepting the consequences of my own decisions just as you are. I wanted to be by your side. And I’d rather you than me. You’re a terrible patient.” 

What I did next was an impulse. An illogical one, crossing an unspoken line we two had walked for years. Since I had returned. Perhaps since the very first day we met. 

I reached to touch the bare skin of his shoulder, the edge of his new stitches. Watson’s eyes dropped fast to my hand, then returned to my face just as quickly. His skin was hot with injury and he hissed through his teeth until I moved my fingers across the width of that old scar. I had not imagined it, before. I could feel his pulse against my hand. 

He didn’t move. Did not even blink. 

“When I was away,” I said, and Watson finally did start at that, a loaded turn of phrase we both knew meant something much deeper than those four words, “there were times when I was certain I would receive news of how my actions had put you in peril. You and your wife both. I would imagine it a hundred times over, one moment undoing everything I was trying to prevent.”

I flattened my hand across his shoulder, covering both old scar and new. Such fleeting warmth that I tried to press into my mind even as I moved to turn away, hoping he could accept it for what it was. Both my intention, and my fear. 

But before I could, he moved first. There were times when I had to consider how best to lead him into understanding, through the processes of deduction and thought. This was not one of them. Rather, where I wavered he stood still. He caught my wrist and held my hand still with his fingers on my pulse. 

“I know that.” 

My hands were unsteady, a tremor in the knuckles I could not stop. The purely physical reactions of the body to its own emotion were inconvenient, and fascinating. 

“My dear Holmes,” Watson said. “Look at me.” 

Up until now, I had led and he had followed. Striving to keep up, and always willing to admire. Here in reverse, I could admire the steady conviction in his voice, the pure heat of his body. I did look at him, because he asked. 

I saw it, so clearly in his eyes and the set of his mouth. He asked me a question without words. _Do you trust me?_

I did. 

He kissed me. 

Sensation, surprise. I couldn’t hold onto detail fast enough. The weight of his upper lip, underneath it, his teeth. He tasted of tobacco. His mustache tickled. We were at odds and awkward until I turned my head and then we fit in a rush of heat. His hand on the side of my face; he touched my bottom lip with his thumb as he pulled away like he wanted to follow his touch with a second one. 

The purely physical reactions of the body to its own emotion. I swayed, he steadied me. He caught my face in his hands. My own had not left his shoulder and I could feel the rapid race of his heart. When I tried to count it into beats I found I couldn’t and again, on an impulse, I leaned forward to meet him. It was easier, the second time. Our mouths met, his pulse leaped. 

That was cause and effect. Like evidence. An experiment worth repeating. 

Watson stepped back, smiled. He offered his hand, I took it. He pulled me towards my room, and my feet went where he took me.

An inverse of what we knew. Old rhythms, well established, turned on their heads. I couldn’t bring myself to care Where he led, I followed.

5\. 1899

The front door to 221B had a specific timbre to it when slammed, which caught my ear like an accusation every time. 

It was followed by a step on the stairs, seventeen of them, and then Watson opened our door, bringing with him a gust of frigid winter air. It tossed papers and the embers of the fire, biting across the nervous system like a slap. From my armchair, I could see fine crystals of snow gathered on the shoulders of his coat and the brim of his hat, his face red with the cold. 

I braced myself, for whatever would happen next. 

“Can you tell me why,” he grumbled this half under his breath, pulling off gloves and scarf and swatting at the melting snow on his hat with businesslike disdain, “the day a bloody blizzard blows into this city, half its population who have never before expressed concern over their own health suddenly decide they must consult me about it? The street outside is more frozen over than the river. I’m surprised I didn’t fall and crack my own head open.” 

This wasn’t what I’d expected to hear upon his return from his rounds, and so I hung onto his familiar irritation, nonspecific and well-meaning, as long as I could. 

“You’ve been to Kensington and back,” I said, removing my pipe from my mouth. “More than once, I believe.” 

“That I have,” Watson said, glancing my way as he tossed his outer garments across the back of a chair with vehemence. “And you remain in the exact same position in which I left you this morning!” 

We had fought, this morning. A senseless and mean clash that Watson might refer to as a row, after the fact. It had boiled up out of nowhere, and Watson’s patience, no doubt fraying due to the number of visits on his schedule and the recent meeting with his publisher and the way the cold always sunk into his joints, had snapped. I had been unkind. And he had stormed away from our breakfast, first upstairs to dress and then outside into the street and the cold without a goodbye. 

I was waiting for his disappointment, the well-thought-out lecture, the tired sigh. Instead, he was busy removing his sodden boots, with none of that on his face. 

“Nonsense,” I said, to say something. “My body may not have moved but since this morning I have resolved seven little mysteries and one rather interesting old murder case all described in those letters stacked on the mantle, mailed here over the last fortnight.” 

Watson laughed, a genuinely amused version of that sound I cherished most. He had one version that turned a little vicious, for when something wasn’t actually funny. And another that, years into our friendship, I had been astonished to find came out only when in bed with him. 

“The adoring public might pay through the nose to see that,” he said. “The great detective cracks cases from the comfort of his armchair. We’ll have to write and let them all know, I suppose.” 

And with that, he threw himself sideways onto his chair with a tremendous sigh. 

It was a curious thing, his anger. Sometimes it rose with a righteous determination from the bottomless well of his steady hands. Sometimes it was quick like a flash. He rarely held grudges, but he remembered arguments, like conversations, from the perspective of a storyteller. For my own sins, I had been known to linger on frustration or jealousy for hours or days. Watson didn’t like to let things fester. 

He had slammed the door behind him leaving that morning, an uncharacteristic physical display. And now, head tipped back over the chair, he returned without that thread of argument hanging over us. Either he was waiting on it - or he had elected, some time during the day, to let it go. I wasn’t sure which felt worse. 

“Can I get you a whiskey?” I said, standing for the first time in hours. 

“Would you, please?” Watson nodded, eyes closed. “I’m chilled to the bone.” 

I splashed amber liquid into a glass, sipped some myself before filling the glass again. Watson took it from my hand without opening his eyes so I took the liberty of brushing my fingers across his hairline. Snow had soaked into his hair through his hat, and I smoothed it flat with my fingers. Grey-silver was beginning to streak his temples, mingling in with the dark gold strands there. Watson sighed. 

“I saved you the paper,” I said, “as you didn’t stop to read it this morning.” 

“That’s alright, old boy,” he said. “I’ll get to it later. Was there any post?” 

“Your edits returned, I believe. I left them on your desk. Watson, you perplex me.” 

He opened one eye to stare up at me through his brows, tilting his head back. At that angle, he was square-jawed and handsome, his lashes blond. He had done an untidy job shaving that morning, and hadn’t noticed. 

“It’s nice to know that’s still possible,” he said, “after all this time.” 

I pulled my fingers from his hair, crossed around the armchair to pull my knees back under me. He was humoring me, or perhaps even laughing at me in the peculiar way he had, turning a joke back in on itself so I could share in it. 

“We hardly parted on good terms this morning and you’re asking after the paper,” I pointed out. I could still hear his angry footsteps, the sharp slam of the door. 

“Never mind that,” he said, opening his eyes properly. “It’s already forgotten.” 

I had behaved abominably, been mean, inconsiderate. Through the years I studied his habits and his edges, his fathomless limits. I had seen him lever weight into his hands to sit to breakfast, favoring one leg and one shoulder, and I had allowed myself to act in order to hurt anyway. An apology was an admission of that. I wanted him to demand one of me, to make it easier to stomach. 

“You were angry,” I pointed out stubbornly. “I vexed you.” 

“For about twenty minutes,” Watson said, genially. “And then I was too tired and too cold to be angry any longer. The older I get, the less pleasure I find in it.” 

I knew him well enough to read the unwritten thought between those words. Men he’d known, like his father, who hadn’t learned the lesson that there was no pleasure in anger. 

“Nonetheless,” I said

The good grace that came so naturally to him - concern and reassurance, compassion, grief, romance - so often seemed to escape me. From my hands such gestures felt cold or clumsy, unnatural. I was not suited for such things.

“I know that I am difficult,” I said, stiffly, “erratic, messy, and exhausting. A sane man would find me impossible to live with, no less weather it for years. I can only admire your patience."

“And yet I have, with only a reasonable measure of complaint. What,” Watson’s eyes creased when he smiled now, a new addition with age, “I wonder, do you suppose that says about me?” 

I looked up at him sharply, and he leaned forward across the space between our chairs to put one well-callused hand on my knee. 

“My dear,” he said, “I was rather vexed, and now I am not. Tomorrow, you may well set fire to the curtains and vex me in a new way. I await the surprise. If you think you are capable of vexing me enough to truly drive me from this armchair, well - “ he squeezed my knee, his fingers now warm through my dressing gown. “You can certainly try. Will you hand me the paper?” 

“You perplex me,” I said again, and I touched his hand and stood to fetch him the paper. 

“I hope you’ll not hold it against me,” Watson said, and accepted the folded pages. He reached up, touched my chin and then my cheekbone. I leaned my face into his fingers for a moment. “And perhaps consider holding something else against me instead, as an apology.” 

“Behave yourself,” I said, and swatted him away. His grin was boyish. It always drew to mind an image of the very young man he had been, long before we met. Round-cheeked and rugged and easily charming. 

And then it softened, the comfortable familiarity of our middle age and the creased lines around his mouth. I saw there the feeling behind his words, behind his easy forgiveness, even behind his anger. That steady love I knew I could always find when I looked for it. 

He didn’t have to say it. I could see it like it was printed on his features, a warmth in his blue eyes and the softness of his jaw. How strange it had been, understanding I was the cause for that warmth for the first time - and every time after, now years on. What was unnatural in myself came unbidden to him. And, in some ways, the inverse was true too. A theoretical puzzle - if we two, in time and our close acquaintance, had grown closer to find those traits missing in the other and endeavored to fill that gap? Watson would say we completed each other. He was the writer, and the romantic. 

We sat in companionable silence for a long moment, looking at each other from our respective armchairs. The fire threw steady light and shadows across his familiar face. Watson sipped his whiskey, propped his bad leg up and opened the newspaper with a rustling of paper. I relit my pipe and watched the snow, now coming down in earnest. 

“Did you already exhaust the newspaper?” Watson asked from behind the folded pages. “Or would you like me to read you the agony column?” 

“I have not,” I said, trying not to smile, “and I might like that if I had any reason to believe you were actually reading the newspaper.”

Watson lowered the pages halfway, to reveal his raised eyebrows. “You accuse me of pretending?” He asked. “If I wish to fall asleep before supper I will do so without shame, my dear Holmes.” 

“I deduce,” I said, “that you are holding a novel beneath your paper, which I can judge by the strange position of your left hand and the fact that you’ve only turned the top portion of the page over. If it’s another dreadful Jules Verne I shall toss it out the window.” 

The paper dropped. He was, indeed, holding onto the corner of a book beneath the paper but it wasn’t, as I had guessed, the hated Verne adventures he kept bringing home. 

“Well,” Watson said, smiling with a kind of open mischievousness that I’d come to recognize through long experience as an indication there was something he wasn’t telling. “I’m afraid it’s one of those mystery stories you abhor. The kind with pining lovers, and twins separated at birth, and a lurid murder. I’m also afraid that I did very much notice my bookmark has been moved since I set it down yesterday.” 

I blushed. Watson grinned. 

“I wanted to know the identity of the killer,” I said, sulkily. 

“If you promise to keep that to yourself,” he said, “then I’ll narrate the end for you.”

6\. 1918

The letter I’d received had been short and to the point; a time, a date, a train line. 

Bundled in my overcoat and scarf I stood shivering on the platform alone as the time came and went. The train was delayed, and every second stretched like agony in my pulse. The afternoon was cold and damp and clung to my bones. 

It had been a long day, a longer month. A long war. Even I, having little to compare it to, could feel that strain in myself and in the unwritten words between the lines of Watson’s letters from faraway. 

We had pursued retirement together, Watson painting a fictional picture of an estrangement that was just plausible to fool his most obvious readers, and settled into a lull of well-earned near-nothingness. And then the world had lost its mind. 

The platform was crowded with people, all impatient that the train should arrive. It felt strange to be in the city again, anonymous in a crowd when I had gotten used to a room turning to ask my advice. I relished it, and pulled my scarf around my face tighter against the chill. Even the press of bodies and rising voices couldn’t cut it, and it wasn’t until the tracks began to rattle and steam that time began to snap forward again. 

Suddenly, my heart was in my throat. Anxious and unsteady, my every nerve was hung on the edge of a great precipice. Icy water and wind at my back, and the promise of something magnificent before me. But not the great reveal of logic on which I had my career. It was nothing that anybody else in the crowded train station would notice, or care to notice.

I felt, for the first time in this long winter, in years - positively young. 

The train disembarked in a slow exhale of steam, cutting through the cold air quick enough to prickle heat under my scarf. Passengers began to exit, jostling and shouting and waving. In the steam and commotion, a hundred tiny reunions took place around me and I could count them all if I cared to. Couples and families and children calling beloved names. 

I waited, raking the commotion with my eyes in search of my target, increasingly desperate as the minutes wore on and the crowd pressed closer to the train. I didn’t know what he was wearing, where in the train he’d been seated. I only trusted my own ability to know him through anything, no matter what. 

And then - just like that - I did. 

It was something in his step, a figure disembarking from a train car at the other end of the platform with a careful unsteady grace. Head bowed and collar turned up, he paused to allow a young woman to cut in front of him, steadied her down with a smile I could not see but could imagine, then moved slowly into the throng. 

I’d know that gait anywhere. Could pick it out of a hundred people, or a thousand. Blindfolded, I would still hear it and know. One step slightly longer than the other, and a shift of the weight from left to right rather than straight. Leading with left hip, right shoulder. Old injury, developing arthritis, and time. 

Watson looked up, searching. His face sweetly lit by the smoky lights. On a whim, I raised one hand high in the air and waved. 

“Watson,” I called it across the platform, across the space between us and all that time. Intolerable fraught months separated by a continent and joined only by our erratic letters and mutual worry, those long three years, and decades and decades. He couldn’t possibly hear me at that distance. It didn’t matter. He held his hand aloft. His face was a beacon, creased and tired and beloved like nothing else I’d ever known. 

I could see his thoughts like he was shouting them. Meant for nobody else but me. _Good God,_ he said without words, _I have missed you, let’s go home._

Ungainly, like a young man with a fresh clue, I pushed my way through the crowd. Disrupting laughter, tears, kisses - I didn’t care. I didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. 

Across the platform, moving closer towards me with every step and every moment, Watson smiled. 

**Author's Note:**

> like i said -- it seems like everybody has to tackle the post "the final problem" moment with these two but i never tire of reading it so i hope you enjoyed it here. ditto writing my own version of "the three garridebs," which i couldn't resist doing. poor watson, he's so easy to whump. he's a good sport about it.
> 
> this whole thing began with the scene of them squabbling in their armchairs and watson pretending to read the paper -- because of that post somewhere online about how they do, on occasion, rattle off smart observations and dash around and save the day but mostly they sit down and stare at each other. and then it spiraled from there. 
> 
> the shakespeare that holmes quotes is, naturally, "a midsummer night's dream." 
> 
> i am leescoresbies.tumblr.com -- comments & thoughts keep my self esteem wheel roooooolllllllin. 
> 
> here's a question to share with me -- who is your IDEAL combination of anybody who's ever played holmes paired with anybody who's ever played watson? jonny lee miller & jude law? jeremy brett & lucy liu? that WASN'T who you were picturing this entire time? shame on you.


End file.
